Ara’s Tale – short film production start

Finally I feel confident enough to go one step further in my CG environment and try to let a long standing dream come true – the production of a short film – the initial reason I started with blender 2.5 years ago.

I decided to document my progress here at my blog, to let the interested take part in my journey.

I will do this whole project in my spare time only and due to this fact and fluctuations of my level of motivation and my totally lack of experience with such an undertaking, I have no idea, when it will be actually finished, but I ( optimistically) aim for a release date end of 2009.

I do not want to give away the story but will try to find a proper balance between documenting the progress and keeping the important story parts in the dark.

Some basic facts though: The story is about a girl (Ara) and a dragon. The style will probably be somewhere between comic and realistic. Estimated running time will be 1:30 min.

After having finished the script and the first version of the storyboard, I am now starting with the design studies, first for the environment including various color/mood tests. This is currently quite educating in many ways. Not having any formal education in drawing/painting, this turned out to be quite a challenge.

The first image shows some images from the actual storyboard to give you some idea. The boards are not in order and a lot of boards are missing of course. The complete storyboard has a count of 38.

See here for a very first environment test – only pencil and with color.

Environment Design Sketch / Simple Color Test

For storyboarding and design sketching I use mypaint, which is really a very cool 2D drawing tool.

I think it will take quite some more time to get the environment and the colors as I imagine them.

I make use of the excellent guide Animating With Blender by Roland Hess and various guides and infos available on the internet. I also hope to get some useful input from my wip thread at blenderartists.org.

I really want to finish this one and dearly hope to have enough strength to pull this off.

Entries are now open for the 2010 Angry Film Festival. For more details go to http://www.angryproductions.org and download an entry form. The only criteria is that films must be under 15 minutes.
The festival will run over two nights. One night will be dedicated to Australian short films and the second night will be dedicated to International short films.

About the Angry Film Festival…

“It is funny to think that this all started so that I could screen my first film THE ANGRY PENGUIN in front of an audience. This small film festival has now become an institution in the heart of Melbourne and is a great support to film makers who are trying to get their stuff screened in front of an audience. Not just an internet audience, but an audience that will be there in person so that the film maker can view first hand the reaction that his film will have in front of a crowd.” Tom Vogel

Thank you Tom for bringing this to my attention. This certainly looks interesting.
I will miss the deadline for 2010 though, as I hope to finish this short in summer 2010 (and even this may be a naive guess).
But I suppose there is a 2011 Festival as well :). As the only criteria is for the short to be less than 15 min. I guess its ok to apply even if it showed already on other festivals or on the internet.